It should not be so easy for police to track you via your cell phone

Texas lawmakers fumbled a chance to make it tougher for police to get your cellphone records.

Bothered by the depth and breadth of snooping the federal government has allowed itself?

Nearly apoplectic that court and legislative oversight of such prying seems to amount to the sheepdog waving in the wolves for lamb chops?

Why then aren't we bothered by the powers of local law enforcement to snoop? They are similar, both in regard to the rubber-stamping and the cloak of secrecy, though key differences emerge.

The Texas Legislature recently muffed an opportunity to require that police at least go through the niceties of asking a judge when they want to compel your cellphone carrier to provide data on whom you've been calling and when.

Given that cellphones are very smart phones when it comes to determining where these calls were made, it's not much of a leap for police, without a warrant or attesting to probable cause, being able to determine where you've been going and surmise with whom you've been meeting.

As an amendment to correct this wound its way through the Legislature, police groups objected. So, it got blocked from a larger bill. They sounded the same claim of keeping us safe that President Obama and others on down have cited to justify federal snooping.

The bill that might have contained the amendment — requiring a warrant and showing of probable cause for cellphone tracking — is actually good legislation. House Bill 2268, which the governor signed, makes state law tougher than federal law in requiring warrants to get emails.

Before, law enforcement officers in Texas need only have served a subpoena (produced by themselves) to get providers to cough up emails older than 180 days. Unless, you are one of those rare OCD email users who purges correspondence as soon as it's read, you've probably got emails hanging around older than Aunt Tilly's fruitcake.

But tracking your cellphone still requires only a subpoena. And, as is being argued at the congressional level, this fails to recognize how far technology has come since the days when everyone used just a landline.

And it is not as if getting a warrant from a judge or a magistrate is a high bar.

I am reliably told that our run-of-the-mill search warrants are pretty much all approved. In Bexar County, that amounted to 1,257 in 2011 and 1,258 in 2012, according to the county District Clerk's office.

There's really no reason to expect that this routine approval would be any different statewide or when applied to requests — were they required — for cellphone tracking.

A feature of both the federal and local processes is that the subjects of warrants or their attorneys are not present to dispute the reasons for the searches being attested to by law enforcement. But at some point at the local level, the defense — and the public — can see what was being sought and why. And then challenge the searches. That's not so with the broad collections sanctioned by our secret FISA court.

And, if warrants were required for cellphone tracking at the local level, at least this would be case by case and warrant by warrant — again, with police having to attest to probable cause. At the federal level, broad secret requests are routinely granted that scoop up a broad array of “metadata.”

Officers should have reasonable access to cellphone tracking information — but they should have to demonstrate to a judge that probable cause exists. This is not unreasonable.

What is unreasonable, however, is that the snooping the federal government claims it needs to “protect us” should also be accorded to local law enforcement. That's been fixed for emails in Texas, but not for cellphones.

And, “trust us,” whether it gets said at the federal or local levels, is inadequate reason to allow this to continue.